Left and right

My sister forwarded me an email recently that had a bunch of brain tricks and optical illusions. Most of them were ones I'd seen before--counting all the fs in a sentence, catching all the "thes" in a sentence, seeing the old lady and the young lady, that sort of thing--but there was one in the email that I hadn't seen before. It was a video clip of a not-very-clothed lady spinning in a circle. The way you saw her turn determined which side of the brain you were using. (For a refresher course in which side does what, check this out.)

As most people who know me can attest, I don't have the best left-and-right skills. It took me a while to decide which hand was making a legitimate "L,"and then I realized that I was seeing this dancer spinning to the left. The description said that if you saw the lady spinning left, you were left-brained, and if you saw her spinning right, you were right-brained. If you could see her spinning both ways, your IQ was 160 or above. Well, I just couldn't imagine that I was left-brained at all, so I had to call my family to confirm that I had the correct left.

They came, and, once I explained my dilemma, they confirmed that I had, indeed, gotten my left correct. My brother saw the lady turning right, and my dad could see her switch back and forth at random. My mom also saw the lady turning to the right.

But as I looked, I realized that I saw the lady switching back and forth as well! Then my brother followed, though my mom could still only see her turning to the right. By this point I was curious (I've never taken an IQ test, and don't actually know what's considered high, but 160 just sounds a lot higher then my IQ should be) as to what brained I really was. So I pulled up a bunch of tests online and my brother and I took them, and found some fairly surprising results. For one thing, I have extremely high left-brainedness. I'm pretty much completely middle-brained, which means I have almost equal strengths on both sides, but I still am stronger in my right brain than my left (though not my much, which was where my surprise lay). As for my brother, he has stronger right-brain dominance than I! For those of you who know my brother and I, one might assume me to be the more right-brained among us, and he the left-brained. But apparently, assumptions are often wrong.

Of course, these tests are generic tests, potentially faulty. I might be completely right-brained after all, but I answer left-brainedly. Who even knows.